An editor of the journal Oral Tradition, Joseph Harris is a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Scandanavian language and culture. He has published extensively on Germanic myth, the heroic tradition, and Anglo-Saxon literature, with a particular interest in the Beowulf poem, its language, and its literary history. He is the editor (with Barbara Hillers) of Child's Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013).